Marriage

And Now It’s Been 10 Years

May 6, 2016 by Gindi 1 Comment

10 years ago today, I said, “I do.” And then he said, “I do.”

And we did.

So you see, I’m feeling a little nostalgic today. I’m doing a retrospective of our life so to speak.

Twelve and a half years together. Six and a half of those with kids. And today, ten of those married.

I used to do convenient tag lines for our anniversaries. My six year anniversary, I had our history all summed up.

I guess the more years pass, the more I struggle for a convenient label to paste on the year. Because there’s so much wrapped up in any given year. There were some absolutely spectacular highs this year. We spent a wonderful week together in Yosemite over the summer. We all traveled – from Alabama to Canada and from Vermont to Arkansas. The kids started kindergarten and Bray and I survived doing homework (we were not ready) every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evening. We celebrated birthdays together and each went through supporting the other through parents surgeries.

But it was also a year full of change. Big change for our little marriage. And we each struggled, individually, even though it seemed we relied on each other and encouraged each other more than ever before.

This year wasn’t without marriage bumps, but they were small, and if anything, the marriage grew stronger as we’ve come to hang on to each other when the tough stuff comes.

I keep a little book every year of the things I’ve learned about this man I love, and why I love him even more. I’m still writing the pages from this year.

I’ve said, along with thousands of marriage predecessors, that marriage is work and love is a choice. But I have to also say, after ten years, love these days hasn’t been as much of a choice. I wake up so utterly grateful God brought us together. I love him when I wake up and I love him when I lay down. I love him when I hear his voice and I love him when I see his face.

We’re no Pollyanna couple. We fight and we bug each other and we disagree, strongly, about any number of issues.

But I trust him.

I believe him.

I respect who he is and what he stands for.

And my prayer is that I’ll still be writing all the new things I love about him at 20 years and 30 years and 40 years.

So 10 years, well, it’s been a rollercoaster year. But I’ll take the ride with him as my partner until death do us part.

We’re The Lucky Ones

March 28, 2016 by Gindi 3 Comments

I was conflicted about what to write on Friday.

It didn’t seem right to write a Fashion Friday on Good Friday.

It seemed more appropriate to write about faith on a sober reflection day. But I’d been short of words and had little fresh to offer.

Then I had this wonderful Thursday night out with my husband and decided I would wait to write until today and write about love.

Last week, a couple invited Bray and I to one of our favorite little spots in all of Houston. It’s basically a bar where singers/songwriters come to croon on a tiny stage in a small room filled with tables crushed in together.

It’s the place Bray and I met over 12 years ago. This singer/songwriter, a new one to me, sang with all her heart in her black leather pants and her side of lemon water. I glanced over to the corner where, in early December 2003, I met Bray wearing my own black leather pants. I can still see us exactly – him walking over from the bar in his blue jeans and button down shirt and a much younger me wearing a long gray sweater and high heeled boots with those pants.

This talented musician crooned about broken hearts and blood moons and Hallelujahs and her grandmother. She even had us turn and sing to each other how I want to be with you.

You see, it was an ordinary Thursday night. Bray had been out of town and I’d been running from a work appointment to the dentist to the house to relieve our nanny. He’d had to coach kindergarten softball, which apparently did not go well, and we were both frayed and torn as we dodged rush hour traffic to make the early concert on a back street in the center of the city.

But as she sang about being the lucky ones, we knew it and believed it and leaned into, and onto, each other. We ate our fish and chips and drank our beer and watched a precious married couple near the front kiss during each song as they celebrated the wife’s birthday with tenderness and obvious adoration.

There’s this idealized romanticized notion of love and marriage with the roses and the silky lingerie that still fits after 10 years and sunset walks on the beach. But you see, I don’t like roses and my honeymoon lingerie doesn’t fit my post-triplet body and we don’t live near a beach.

I wouldn’t trade all that in for my real life lessons on love and marriage. Where we go on dates and I have peanut butter on my hair and he pretends not to notice and we still hold hands and we kiss hello and goodbye and he wakes up at 5 am to hide Easter eggs so we can enjoy one more year of the kids believing and hunting eggs in pajamas at daybreak. We mess it up and hurt each other’s feelings and struggle to compromise, but we can still sit in a little hole in the wall on a back street in the center of the city and be oh-so-grateful to have found each other in the exact same spot on that late night all those years ago.

On The Couch

February 17, 2016 by Gindi Leave a Comment

I live in the house my husband lived in while we were dating. He and his brother bought it as an investment and planned to flip it. That was in 2003. Six months before I met him.

When we got married, we bought his brother out and are raising our kids in the same house where our romance first bloomed.

Back then, there were three guys living in the house. The two brothers and their friend. The den had these old green couches from his brother’s college days, and I have memories of us curled up on the couch watching t.v. over a decade ago.

I remember the early days, when I first would come over, we’d sit close and our legs would brush and I’d feel this surge of electricity through my whole body. Sigh. I was madly in love with him.

I remember holding hands. I remember him putting his arm around me as I leaned into his chest and breathed in the sensation of new love and romantic chemistry.

I still think he’s the sexiest man alive.

I still can get caught completely off guard by a kiss. It takes my breath away.

But we don’t do it as much anymore.

The electric currents are rarer because we’re getting dinner on the table and updating our schedules and splitting up the reading homework at night and going to bed completely fried from too little sleep and too much still to do.

This week, I was sitting in the big leather chair when he came in to sit on the couch (a different one now) and watch a little news. I heard a little voice inside my head saying, you should get up and sit on the couch with him.

See, in the old days, there wasn’t even a stand alone chair in the room. Just couches (smart single boys). We wouldn’t have even used a chair if there’d been one though because we wanted to be as physically proximate as we could.

But now, we almost never sit next to each other because one of us is in the chair and one of us is in the couch. Or we have a lapfull of kids. Or we’re at the kitchen table and the kids fight over who gets to sit next to mommy and daddy.

So up I got and sat as close as I possibly could get without landing on his lap. I grabbed his arm and threw it around my shoulder and snuggled into his chest. After watching the weather, he started flipping channels and landed at the beginning of Rocky III. I am a HUGE fan of Rocky movies, and he couldn’t help but be amused by the 1980s hilarity of Rocky against Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. We laughed and leaned in and replicated a scene that looked a lot like one from 2004.

Then I attacked him because getting all up in one another’s physical space will do that to you.

Married friends: we have to be more intentional about the romance.

Everyday romance.

There were no flowers or candlelight or fancy clothes or champagne on this night, but this was romance nonetheless. I was in an old t-shirt and ponytail, but I felt like the younger version of myself all gussied up and wanting so much for this boy to fall in love with me like I’d fallen in love with him. I still swoon with slow kisses. I still feel electricity when I’m pressed up against him. It is all still there. We’ve just got to dust it off.

More time on the couch. Less time in the chair.

More time flirting. Less time scheduling.

More time kissing. Less time sleeping. (It’s worth the trade.)

Two Trees

December 7, 2015 by Gindi 1 Comment

There are two trees that stand tall and wide in knotted glory over the backyard.

I love these two trees that keep a watchful and shaded eye over picnics and football games and those who venture onto the swing hung from their branches.

I couldn’t stop looking at them this Thanksgiving week we spent at the farm though.

Sitting on the back porch, anyone can see they are clearly two trees. But as you begin to wander around the yard, it becomes less evident.

Their expansive branches fuse one right into the other so you can’t tell from above where the one tree stops and the others starts. If you walk to the driveway and study them from the side, you can’t see the window of space which separates one from the other and they merge in your vision into one magnificent mark of nature. Even though we can’t see their roots spread out deep into the soil, I am confident in the depth of the dark dirt they appear even more like one. Roots twisted and turned around each other having grown down deep into the same small space of land.

They’ve been tested and torn. They survived two massive hurricanes in the past ten years. They lost leaves and branches and limbs but still they stood. Each separate but inextricably intertwined with the other.

God’s illustration of marriage.

We’re approaching our ten year wedding anniversary. This week marks our first date twelve years ago.

We’ve faced some hurricanes of our own, one of the biggest hit this fall. This is what I know:

Our branches have begun to overlap so that from some angles we look more like one than ever.

Our roots have grown deep and twisted and turned around one another.

I need this man more today than I ever have.

I love this man more today than I ever knew I could when I began to fall all those years ago.

I have seen earthquakes and hurricanes tear down gorgeous couplings older and deeper than our own. In an era when marriages are assailed with powerful torrents every single day called pornography and addiction and financial indebtedness and loss and mistrust and technology and long hours at the office and Ashley Madison, it’s a wonder any still stand.

I’m not so naïve to think we are immune from the storms. In fact, I wouldn’t want our marriage to avoid all storms because then it wouldn’t be able to withstand a simple bayou breeze when it came through. I know the rain comes and the storms beat on all the houses (Matthew 7) and trees, and the only way a house has a chance of standing is if it’s built on the Rock or rooted deep in Him.

So we pray for strength. We pray for grace. We pray for mercy. We pray for wisdom. We trust that our faith will allow us to draw from something deeper so we will remain standing on the other side of the storm.

I know marriage is hard. (Some days. Some days it is awesome and fun and easy and a piece of cake…) But the ones that withstand the storms are such a beautiful picture of who God is and how two unique and lovely independent trees can come to grow together and rely on one another.

Hard Stories: Being Selfish

July 7, 2015 by Gindi 3 Comments

I was torn. Little bit kept wavering on whether she’d stay at the main house or the bayou house, and the baby was wailing because of an injured ankle. I started the car, it was already late because we had so many fireworks to pop, and tried to load the boys.

Little bit said she would stay with her grandparents, and the remaining four of us set off across the pasture. The car parked at the back door with me still in a quandary over whether to stay with the boys or go back to the main house.

I got the baby settled in a chair with a wash cloth and icepack and decided to head back. The boys were tearful and asked me to stay. I said I’d come back if little bit was still dressed.

I drove back across the pasture with my headlights full of bugs in the dark night and lugged my bag into the main house. Little bit was happy as a clam in her p.j.s “making her beauty” with grandmother, her pink blanket already settled in between her grandparents pillows.

She brushed her teeth and told me she would stay in their room. I decided to stay put, and I washed my face and laid down in the guest room, alone.

And cried.

I didn’t stay where I was most needed mainly because I was angry at my husband. As the night had worn on, we had a silly argument, and I could tell he was angry at how I responded. I started the fireworks with the kids before he came out, and we didn’t interact for the rest of the evening. I wasn’t particularly interested in staying with him.

Had we been home, we’d have gone to sleep in the same room, maybe angry, but we’d have slept in the same bed. Yet here I had an out. Another house and a paper thin excuse that the one child with two adults might need me specifically.

The baby with the injury and the eldest with his pleading, and even my husband who had taken my bags to the other house earlier, were the ones who really wanted me with them. And I left for selfish reasons.

I had also had three glasses of wine over the course of the evening, and I can make foolish decisions when my brain is fuzzy instead of fueled with the clarity of action my faith requires me to take.

I had also shared a story with my mother-in-law about the first time I saw my father after the divorce, quite sometime as the case was and in less than ideal circumstances, and I had never spoken the story out loud before, not even to my husband. I somehow managed to feel the wounds fresh on my heart all these years later.

I can still be selfish. I can still be foolish. I can still be wounded.

It was not an irreparable action. Yet those selfish, foolish, wounded-fueled decisions in marriage and parenting can add up if you don’t watch it. It becomes all too easy to write off the instance as “a one-off” and not ask for forgiveness and determine to do better the next time. Then those costly one-offs add up to more distance and more damage.

There is hope. In the midst of the I can be’s… (add your own laundry list of less-than adjectives).

I can do all this through Christ who gives me strength. Phil. 4:13

So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. Romans 11:5-6

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. Phil. 1:6

There is grace for a new day. So I can be forgiven. I can start anew. I can do it better. I can be selfless, and wise, and healed.

This week is about the hard stories. The ones I’m not particularly happy to share. But if we don’t start talking about the hard stories, how we will find our way to the other side?

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